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Wednesday, February 08, 2017

`Sixty Years Later We Behold Yegor's Grandson'

Kultura was a Polish émigré journal
published from 1947 to 2000 by Instytut Literacki, first in Rome and then Paris.
Among its contributors were Czesław Miłosz, Wisława Szymborska, Witold
Gombrowicz, Marek Hłasko and Józef Czapski. Its co-founder was Gustaw
Herling-Grudziński, best known in the U.S. for A World Apart (trans. Joseph Marek, 1951), his account of the two
years he spent in a Soviet concentration camp on the White Sea.Grudziński took the title
for his memoir from The House of the Dead,
by another writer who spent time in a Russian prison camp:

“Here
there is a world apart, unlike everything else, with laws of its own, its own
manners and customs, and here in the house of the living dead — life as nowhere
else and a people apart. It is this corner apart that I am going to describe.”

In
1970, The Free Press published Kultura
Essays, a selection of literary and political pieces from the journal, edited
by Leopold Tyrmand. Included is work by Czapski, Juliusz Mieroszewski, Aleksander
Wat and three essays by Grudziński. One of them is “Yegor and Ivan Denisovich,”
and at least one of the proper names in the title ought to be familiar to most readers.
In 1962, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn published his first novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, in the Soviet literary
magazine Novy Mir, and the world
changed. Two translations into English were published in 1963, and I first read
the Max Hayward/Ronald Hingley version a few years later (three other translations
followed).Ivan
Denisovich Shukhov has been sentenced to ten years in a forced labor camp in
the Gulag. He was captured as a prisoner of war by the Germans during World War
II, and the Soviets wrongly convict him of spying, as they did thousands of
other Russian soldiers. The book was turned into a memorable film in 1970, with
Tom Courtney in the title role.

Less
familiar, for Grudziński’s purposes, is another Russian book about prison –
Chekhov’s Sakhalin Island. It’s based
on the 4,000-mile journey by train, horse-drawn carriage and river steamer he
made to the katorga, or penal colony,
Sakhalin Island, north of Japan. There he spent three months interviewing
convicts and settlers. The resulting book has been read as a crusading
documentary on the appalling conditions in which Russian prisoners lived. That’s
accurate, but here’s what Chekhov wrote in a letter to his friend Ivan
Leontiev-Shcheglov shortly before leaving Moscow in April 1890:

“I
am not going in order to observe or get impressions, but simply so that I can
live for half a year as I have never lived up to this time. So don’t expect
anything of me, old fellow; if I have the time and ability to achieve anything,
then glory be to God; if not, don’t find fault with me.”

Dr.
Chekhov was thirty years old and already suffering from the tuberculosis that
would kill him in 1904. Grudziński writes: “It is almost unbelievable how much
he managed to accomplish in such a short time. He visited all the prisons and
settlements, he made a census of the island, he recorded dozens of
conversations, and single-handed he initiated investigations like those
undertaken nowadays by university teams of skilled investigators and survey
specialists. He was only forbidden access to political prisoners.”

Grudziński
reads Sakhalin Island as an encrypted
indictment of Czarist Russia: “In fact, the mixture of expedition report,
official inventory, statistical yearbook, and investigation encompassing the
fields of psychology, sociology, medicine, and law contained in his book about
Sakhalin could not fool the reader, though it might deceive the censor.”

Only
Chapter 6 in Chekhov’s book carries a title, “Yegor’s Story.” Grudziński, the
former Gulag prisoner, concentrates on Yegor, a forty-year-old peasant with “a
simple-hearted, seemingly half-witted face.” He writes: “For Chekhov the humble
anguish of Yegor was a condemnation of society.” After a section break, he
continues: “Sixty years later we behold Yegor’s grandson or great-grandson in
the penal colony, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov.”

I
first read Sakhalin Island almost
nine years ago when I found a copy in Powell’s Books in Portland, Ore. This is
a beautiful, fully annotated edition translated by Brian Reeve and published in
2007 by Oneworld Classics. It includes photographs, a biography of Chekhov, a
bibliography, a selection of his letters pertaining to Sakhalin and the book’s
first chapter printed in Russian. It’s one of my favorite books. The great
Irish essayist Hubert Butler writes in “Materialism Without Marx: A Study of
Chekhov,” published in 1948 and collected in Independent Spirit (1996):

“His
book Sakhalin Island, the result of
this journey, has only recently been translated, because it is in conflict with
the accepted Chekhov legend. It is not wistful, resigned and full of subdued
melancholy. It is blazing with certainty and indignation, and because of that,
in spite of its tragic contents it is perhaps the most hopeful and optimistic
of all his writings. He believed that it was worthwhile to be passionately
indignant about remediable injustice and that to remedy injustice was not the
task of the statistician, the trained welfare officer, the experienced
committeeman, it was the task of every man of sensibility and integrity.”